Conceiving difference through alternative reading strategies:Deleuze, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida and Post-Civil Rights US minority texts.

Loading...
Thumbnail Image

Persistent link to this item

Statistics
View Statistics

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Title

Conceiving difference through alternative reading strategies:Deleuze, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida and Post-Civil Rights US minority texts.

Published Date

2009-07

Publisher

Type

Thesis or Dissertation

Abstract

This dissertation aims at engineering a dialogue between Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Jacques Derrida's conceptions of difference and expressions of difference in Post-Civil Rights US minority texts. I assemble these divergent manifestations of difference under the united cause of resisting a "master" discourse of difference which harnesses difference as the rationale of Modern racism. I begin by introducing the problematic of an established narrative that maintains difference in negative relation to "sameness." This narrative subordinates difference vis-à-vis an imagined white universal subjectivity, evacuating the singular, a-relational difference inherent to the particular. The four chapters of my dissertation argue for a reclaiming of positive, non-dialectical difference by proposing alternative reading strategies. I synthesize Deleuze and Guattari's notions of "becoming-minority," "deterritorialization" and "collective enunciation of minor literature," Deleuze's writing on the "suspension of judgment," and a Deleuzian understanding of Spinoza's Ethics with Derrida's conceptions of "becoming friendship," "becoming literary," "différance," "interval of undecidability," and "lovence." The texts used to bear out these articulations of difference include artworks by Kara Walker and Faith Ringgold, the legal storytelling of Derrick Bell, the album liner notes of John Coltrane and the fiction of Maxine Hong Kingston. This dialogue on difference, between philosophy and cultural texts, produces ways of imagining subjectivities that resist the conception of subjectivity associated with such figures as Aristotle, Descartes and Hegel. These figures are among the "masters" whose discourse of difference I challenge through the uprising of Deleuze, Guattari and Derrida in conjunction with differential writing produced by US minorities.

Description

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. July 2009. Major: Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society. Advisor: Cesare Casarino. 1 computer file (PDF); vi, 231 pages. Ill. (some col.)

Related to

Replaces

License

Collections

Series/Report Number

Funding information

Isbn identifier

Doi identifier

Previously Published Citation

Suggested citation

Park, Susan Shin Hee. (2009). Conceiving difference through alternative reading strategies:Deleuze, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida and Post-Civil Rights US minority texts.. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/53762.

Content distributed via the University Digital Conservancy may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor. By using these files, users agree to the Terms of Use. Materials in the UDC may contain content that is disturbing and/or harmful. For more information, please see our statement on harmful content in digital repositories.